Spearman (rank) correlation is often a good alternative for nonlinear relationships.
Metacelsus
Karma: 1,223
Testing ChatGPT for cell type recognition
>heats the water (adenosine diphosphate, ADP) to a closely related, higher-energy form (adenosine triphosphate, ATP), which is steam.
I would say protons are the steam, not the ATP/ADP. The electron transport chain “pressurizes” protons by pumping them, and then the protons flow through the ATP synthase “turbine”.
I think the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a largely irrelevant question.
Given that it’s plausible it could have come either from a wet market or risky biological research, we should shut down both.
(Personally I would say 60% “wet market”, 40% “unintentional lab leak”)
That make sense. If I were going for sarcasm I would have said Kary Mullis.
A Nobel-winning scientist like Gregg Semenza would obviously be the best possible expert
Funny you should say that . . .
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/02/nobel-prize-winner-gregg-semenza-tallies-tenth-retraction/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03032-9
Emmett Shear on college-level organic chemistry. His experience was that the class was composed of a mix of science track and premed track students. The science students are there to actually learn and retain the material, so even though it’s a massive amount of compounding facts you have to learn, they do fine. Whereas the premed students are happy to do the work, but are thinking of the class as a structural barrier rather than source of information, so they cram rather than retaining information, and then struggle. So it is a question of motivation. How do we get students, across the board, to be motivated by actually caring about the material?
As a former TA for organic chemistry, I can definitely confirm this.
As a scientist I strongly agree. It seems like there’s been a few steps towards this in recent years, for example with things like the Arc Institute or FROs. Hopefully this model gets the attention of government funders.
>I haven’t heard a “Polack joke” in years and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rising generation is mostly unaware that there ever was such a thing.
On the contrary, I heard one at an ACX meetup in Boston in summer 2023. I was not amused.
>I think it makes sense for some country with a high rate of alcohol flush reaction to legalize using 1-butanol or oxane as a substitute for ethanol in drinks served at bars and restaurants.
The only downside is that butanol tastes pretty awful.
I think it would be useful to examine cases where important patents for Input X expired and prices came down quickly, allowing Input X to be used to produce much more of Product Y.
That is very wrong. Diamond is hard to make with enzymes because they can’t stabilize intermediates for adding carbons to diamond.
As a biochemist, I agree.
It does integrate into the genome. It’s gene therapy, but not gene editing (which means editing an existing gene).
Consolidating my previous comments:
I discussed this project with GeneSmith and I think it is promising, though very challenging to implement in practice. The hardest part will be safely and efficiently delivering the editing agent to a large fraction of the cells in the brain.
Some other points:
CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment for certain types of cancer, requires the removal of white blood cells via IV, genetic modification of those cells outside the body, culturing of the modified cells, chemotherapy to kill off most of the remaining unmodified cells in the body, and reinjection of the genetically engineered ones. The price is $500,000 to $1,000,000.
And it only modifies a single gene.
This makes it sound like CAR-T is gene editing, but it isn’t. Instead of editing a gene, it introduces a new one (a chimeric T-cell receptor). Although some companies are working on gene editing to enhance CAR-Ts.
I also know of a PHD student in George Church’s lab that was able to make several thousand edits in the same cell at the same time by targeting a gene that has several thousand copies spread throughout the genome.
The paper reporting this was here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7229841/
CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment for certain types of cancer, requires the removal of white blood cells via IV, genetic modification of those cells outside the body, culturing of the modified cells, chemotherapy to kill off most of the remaining unmodified cells in the body, and reinjection of the genetically engineered ones. The price is $500,000 to $1,000,000.
And it only modifies a single gene.
This makes it sound like CAR-T is gene editing, but it isn’t. Instead of editing a gene, it introduces a new one (a chimeric T-cell receptor). Although some companies are working on gene editing to enhance CAR-Ts.
There’s also a lot of statistics that go into designing experiments (rather than analyzing them afterwards). For example, fractional factorial designs, or adaptive clinical trials
Yeah, Yudkowsky doesn’t know what he’s talking about here.
Still, one of the ways protein engineers can make proteins more heat-stable is by adding more covalent bonds (in particular, disulfide crosslinks to prevent unfolding). See the many results for https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=thermostability+disulfide+bond&hl=en
Overhead. Researchers typically spend 30–50% of their time on grants
To me, “overhead” means “I only get to spend 58% of the money I raise, Harvard takes the other 42%”.
>And even without LLMs, the number of graduate students who would be capable of doing this has been increasing quickly as technological progress and biological infrastructure decrease the difficulty.
Grad student mental health support might be the next big EA cause area.
A commenter on my Substack got much better results using Claude 3 Opus.